Color Mars Panorama and Meteor Shower Saturday Night

The first color panorama looking around the landing site has been taken by the cameras on the mast of the Curiosity rover.  In the picture, we are seeing a late afternoon scene, with the dramatic shadow of the rover, the reddish martian sand, and the grey splotches made where the rocket exhaust disturbed the ground.  The set of stitched-together images shows the scene 360 degrees around the rover; as if we were right there with Curiosity. I love it.  Even better images are going to be taken, but this first look around is what the scientists have been waiting for to get their bearings.
See: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/multimedia/pia16029.html
for the version with NASA's caption.

Coming back down to Earth, this Saturday night and Sunday morning are the peak of the Perseid (pronounced Purr--see--ud) meteor shower for 2012.  What that means in English is that, if you go outside and away from city lights after about 11 pm Saturday evening or early Sunday morning, you will see more shooting stars than usual.  If you are patient, allow your eyes to get adapted to the dark, and find a spot where you have a good view of the whole sky, you should be rewarded -- over time -- with a good number of chunks of cosmic material burning up in our planet's atmosphere.

The chunks in this "shooting star" shower are left over from an old comet called Swift-Tuttle, which has passed our way many times over the eons, and left a lot of dust in its wake.  When the Earth intersects that stream of dust and dirt, we get a shooting star each time a piece burns up by air friction.

I recommend viewing the shower with someone with who you enjoy spending time in the dark.

For more, see the nice article from Sky & Telescope magazine at: http://www.skyandtelescope.com/about/pressreleases/Perseid-Meteors-in-Their-Prime-165482256.html

Seven Minutes of Terror: Curiosity Rover to Land on Mars

If all goes well, and keep all your fingers crossed that it does, the most complex laboratory ever sent to another world will land on Mars next Sunday night. The Curiosity Mars Rover is slated for Ma

rs touchdown Sunday, August 5, at 10:31 PM Pacific time, in a never-before-tried rocket-powered sky-crane landing. To see, what's involved and why NASA's Mars scientists all have their nails bitten down to the fingertips, check out the video about the "Seven Minutes of Terror" after the craft reaches the top of Mars; thin atmosphere:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ki_Af_o9Q9s

 

 

 

Here is a great image from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which builds and manages so many of our robot probes to the planets. This show the three generations of Mars rovers, the little Sojourner at the front left, S

pirit/Opportunity to the left of the two technicians, and then big Curiosity (the one that we hope to land on Sunday) on the right. NASA says if Spirit and Opportunity were golf carts, then Curiosity is a car. It has 10 science instruments, weighs almost one ton, and requires too much power to use solar cells (as the previous generations of rovers did). It has a generator powered by radioactive plutonium dioxide on board. 

Among its tools is a microscope that can see things as small as the width of a human hair! And the microscope tool carries a small light so it can do night work. Its laser can vaporize rocks up to 23 feet away, and "smell" what they are made of from the vapor. Since (at the time of the landing) messages from Earth will take 14 minutes to get to Mars, the rover has artificial intelligence software for making any immediate decisions that are required. The question is, is Curiosity smarter than your little brother?

Saturn's Large Moon May Have Underground Ocean

Measurements from the Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn, made between 2006 and 2011, indicate that Saturn's largest moon may have a layer of liquid water under its icy surface. 

This intriguing moon, called Titan, is already notorious for having an atmosphere thicker than Earth's -- something no other known moon has. Under Titan's atmosphere, Cassini has shown us lakes and rivers made of methane (liquid swamp gas) and not water. The temperature in that cold region of the solar system is always low and Titan's frigid surface is at something like - 290 degrees Fahrenheit.

At such temperatures, water on the surface is frozen solid -- in fact, "rocks" on Titan (photographed by our little lander) are made of water ice. But the new measurements indicate that below its outer icy shell, Titan may contain an ocean of liquid water.  At such temperatures, water on the surface is frozen solid -- in fact, "rocks" on Titan (photographed by our little lander) are made of water ice. But the new measurements indicate that below its outer icy shell, Titan may contain an ocean of liquid water.

This is not the only moon in the solar system where astronomers suspect that liquid water may exist underground -- several of Jupiter's moons, especially the one called Europa -- also show indications of a sub-surface ocean. 

And, a much smaller moon of Saturn's, called Enceladus, has steamy geysers of salt water erupting from giant cracks. Water seems to be a common substance in the solar system (and the universe) and we are detecting it as vapor, as solid ice, and -- increasingly -- in liquid forms under the surface of other worlds.  

For more on the Titan story, see:
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2012/28jun_titanocean/

From Dust to Dust: A Planet Too Close to Its Star

Astronomers have used the Kepler Observatory (a giant camera in space that is searching for evidence that planets orbit other stars) to make a remarkable discovery.  They found a planet taking only a little more than 15 hours to orbit its star.  Think about that figure!  Our own Earth takes 365 ¼ days -- what we call one year -- to orbit the Sun. Even heat-scorched Mercury takes 88 days to go around our star.  A planet whose “year” is only 15 hours must orbit extremely close to the star and must thus be exposed to searing heat.  

Indeed this planet is so close that the heat of its star appears to be evaporating its rocky surface and creating a cloud of dust, which we can see blocking the star light on each orbit. This planet is doomed to become nothing but dust in the next 200 million years or so, calculations show.  The temperatures at its surface are estimated to be 3300 degrees Fahrenheit.  

The star and planet are about 1500 light years away, so we are not likely to be visiting them any time soon.  But if you go, be sure you take a good asbestos space suit.  

For more on the story, see: http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/news/features/2012/Kepler_Detects_Potential_Evaporating_Planet_feature.html

Coming in June: SETIcon

Next month, the nonprofit SETI Institute (the organization devoted to the search for life in the universe) will be holding a big weekend public event in the San Francisco Bay Area which I will be part of. For those of you who will be (or could be) in the area, here is more information about some of the remarkable people who will be joining me:

SETIcon II: A Weekend Where Science and Imagination Meet
June 22 - 24, 2012
Hyatt Regency Hotel, Santa Clara, California

See: http://www.seticon.org for more information

Guests will include:

* Frank Drake, the astronomer who undertook the first project to listen for extra-terrestrial radio messages and founded the SETI field
* Alan Stern, principal investigator for the New Horizons mission to Pluto and former associate administrator for science missions at NASA
* Robert J. Sawyer, award-winning science fiction writer -- who has written some of the best novels about alien contact
* Rosaly Lopes, planetary scientist at the Jet Propulsion Lab and one of the world's experts on volcanoes on other worlds
* Jill Tarter, the leader of the quest to find signals from alien civilizations -- on whom Jodie Foster's character in the film "Contact" is based

* Mae Jemison, Shuttle astronaut and the first African-American woman in space (who played Lieutenant Palmer on "Star Trek: Next Generation")
* Geoff Marcy, astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, who is considered the foremost planet hunter in the world today
* Alex Filippenko, part of the team that received the 2011 Nobel Prize for discovering the "dark energy" that is speeding up the expansion of the entire universe
* Robert Picardo, television actor who has appeared in "Star Trek: Voyager," "Stargate," "China Beach," and other programs
* Debra Fischer, of Yale University, co-discoverer of the first system of planets around another star

* Seth Shostak, host of "Big Picture Science", Huffington Post columnist, and the public scientist at the SETI Institute
* Alex Hall, the senior director of the $30 million Google Lunar X-Prize
* Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer-prize winning author and historian of the atomic bomb
* Scott Hubbard, Stanford, NASA's first Mars Program Director and the former director of NASA's Ames Research Center
* David Morrison of NASA, who has been the point person in debunking the myth of Doomsday 2012

* plus members of the Kepler Mission science team, authors, artists, and many of the key scientists from the SETI Institute.

(Confession: I have the pleasure and privilege of being the Vice-chair of the Institute's Board of Trustees.  However, I am not being paid to be at the convention or for anything I do for the Institute, so I am not gaining financially in any way by sharing this information with you. I always like to be very clear about such things.)

The Moon Over Lick Observatory

Photo by Rick Baldridge (Peninsula Astronomical Society)



"Super-moon" This Weekend (Sort of)

This weekend, two characteristics of the Moon will conspire to make it look a little brighter and a little bigger than usual. It might just give you an extra reason to take a night stroll with someone with whom you like to spend time in the dark. At about the same time, the Moon with be full and closest to the Earth in its slightly oval orbit. This means the full Moon Saturday night will be somewhat more spectacular than in a typical month. It has no bad effects on us, but it will be nice to look at. (The media are calling it a super-moon, which is a bit of an exaggeration, but it's worth glancing up at, if your evening is clear.)

Even the very responsible story from NASA is a bit strong, but it's probably the best reference to learn more:
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2012/02may_supermoon/

If you worry that the full Moon is connected with "lunacy" and crazy behavior, and this close moon will only make things worse, fear not! Many experiments have now shown that there is NO connection between strange behavior, crimes, or births and the full moon. If you want to learn more, you can check out my resource guide to astronomical "pseudo-science" at: 
http://www.astrosociety.org/education/resources/pseudobib.html

Hope your Saturday night is a heavenly one!

A Magnificent Cluster of Stars Captured

I wanted to share a remarkable new Hubble Space Telescope image with you. In the accompanying picture, you see a magnificent cluster of over 250,000 stars, a grouping whose catalog number is M9. (This designation comes from a list Charles Messier made long ago of fuzzy objects of interest in the sky.)  The colorful cluster is in the direction of the center of our Milky Way galaxy, some 25,000 light years away. (This means that, traveling at the speed of light, it would take you 25,000 years to travel there!) What's fascinating about this Hubble image -- taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys -- is how clearly we can see individual stars in this crowded, distant group. (The cluster is so far away and so small that it takes up about as much of the sky as the head of pin, held at arms' length.)

The stars in this cluster are typically older than the Sun and contain fewer of the heavier elements that make life and technology on Earth possible. Such clusters, called globular clusters, are thought to be among the oldest objects in our Milky Way Galaxy.  We study the globular clusters like M9 to learn more about the archaeology of our home galaxy and how things were in our neighborhood long before the Sun and the Earth ever existed.